Page 90 of Never Kiss the Bad Boy

“Do not ever speak about her like that again. She’s not a chick,” I grit out.

Frogger grins, his hands out placatingly. “Just teasing, man. Sorry.” I toss him away, and he wipes his hands over his shirt, smoothing it, and then shakes out his mullet like it might’ve gotten mussed too. I think he’s done, but then he looks up at me through his lashes and whispers, “Fine, she’s not a chick. But you didn’t deny the scary part.”

I make a lunging step toward him and he flinches. He thinks this is our usual shit-talking and teasing, the same as any other time we’ve given each other a hard time, but it’s different this time. Because it’s about Dani.

“Frogger, if you have a lick of self-preservation, shut the fuck up,” Wayne advises, reading my mood better than anyone.

But Zeus is getting involved now, albeit more earnestly. “Did you tell her the fence thing isn’t your fault?” he asks. “She has to understand that, right?” The full display of his youthful innocence would be cute any other time. Right now, it’s one more reminder that when the shit hits the fan, Dani goes to war with the world alone. No matter whether she has people in her corner or not. She’ll shut them out and handle things herself because she thinks she has to, or feels like she needs to, to prove herself.

“She wouldn’t answer the door.”

“Ooh,” they sing in unison, all cringing.

“That’s bad, Bossman.” Zeus’s offered analysis is the same as my own, but I don’t acknowledge that. “Too bad, she was just getting to be nice and fun.” I give him a pointed look, and he corrects, “To us, I mean. Like she fed us the other day and let us sit beneath the tree. I’m sure she’s been nice and fun to you for a while…” He trails off at the murderous look I’m giving him.

“And again—shut. The fuck. Up,” Wayne says, telling Zeus this time.

“Fence has to be completed today, so get to work,” I tell them both, and they rush to get back to the relative safety of the fence, moving on to undoing the bolts for the vertical post connections.

I walk over to the trailer that has the new metal posts and composite fence panels and start counting them, even though I know exactly how many are carefully stacked up because I inventoried the order when I picked it up this morning.

I want to be left alone, but Wayne never gives a shit what I want anyway so he follows me. “She mad at you for this whole deal?”

I don’t look his way, keeping my gaze firmly locked on the top panel for no good reason other than not wanting to get into this with Wayne, or anyone else. Except Dani.

“Apparently,” I huff. Wayne chuckles, and I cut my eyes over at him. “You’re laughing about this?”

He shrugs, his face an expression of ‘fuck yes, I am.’ “I don’t know Dani, not like you do, but does she seem like the type that gets knocked down and gets all up in her feels about it? Do you think she was in there, crying her eyes out in her pillow and whining about why the world is always against her?”

I laugh at that. “No. Telling the world to fuck off is more like it.”

“That’s what I figured. How do you think a woman gets that way? A soft, easy life or a rough, hard one?”

We both know the answer.

“So you have to decide if you’re gonna be the one all up in your feels” —he makes a crybaby face, frowning and rubbing his balled-up fists in front of his eyes— “or man the fuck up and help her.” He slaps his chest, the sound a wake-up thud in my ears.

His piece said, he walks away, leaving me to my thoughts. And apparently, all up in my feels.

By the end of the day, we’ve got the old fence taken down, the new fence installed, and I’ve got a plan in action. Best of all, with all the dirty looks Dani has thrown at me all day, I don’t think she’s caught on to my scheming.

There’s only one little-bitty hiccup.

“Are you seriously just leaving?” the hiccup, a.k.a. Dani, snaps as I open my truck door and climb into the cab. She’s fired up—eyes flashing, hands on her hips, and lips pressed into a thin line.

One foot on the floorboard and one on the ground, I sigh. “I don’t want to fight. I’m fucking exhausted from hauling those heavy-ass panels all day, and I know you’re as mad at me as you are at Kathy, but I really don’t want to fight, okay?”

“Do you understand what she’s done?” Dani demands. “What you’ve done?”

“I didn’t do a fucking thing except what I was hired to do. If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been someone else putting that fence in, and the end result would be the same. It was probably Kathy’s plan all along.”

I don’t know that for a fact, but I wouldn’t put it past the woman who dragged me around the whole yard, alternating between talking about flower beds and her pool at length and bitching about Dani. I’d finally had to tell her that I wasn’t getting involved in neighbor disputes and demanded she stick to project questions, concerns, and plans only. Kathy had been pissed as a hornet at that, giving me a piece of her mind that included such hits as ‘if I’m paying you, you’ll do whatever I want you to’ and ‘well, I never’, but eventually, she’d stomped off when I’d refused to engage in any anti-Dani discussion.

“It would’ve been better if it hadn’t been you,” she spits out.

She’s right in a way, because if it wasn’t me, we wouldn’t be having this argument. But also, if it wasn’t me, I would’ve never met Dani, and whatever fuck stick Kathy hired would’ve definitely made Dani’s life harder because Kathy all but offered me a flat-out bribe to put the fence a few more inches over Zach’s precise line. Anyone else might’ve taken it, but I have too much integrity to consider a bribe, period. Especially in a situation where Dani’s involved.

“Well, it’s too late for that,” I declare. She sputters like she’s not sure what to say to that. “Is there anything I can do to help you this weekend? Send a Costco order or anything?”

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